


Nobody Compares to You

by chocolatechimkookie



Category: Produce 101 (TV), UP10TION, X1 (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Flower Language, Longing, M/M, Post-Break Up, Seeing colours when with your soulmate, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:07:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21903469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolatechimkookie/pseuds/chocolatechimkookie
Summary: Jinhyuk is waiting for his colours to appear, though now that they have perhaps he was happier without them after all.
Relationships: Kim Minkyu (Produce 101)/Lee Jinhyuk, Kim Wooseok | Wooshin/Lee Jinhyuk
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	Nobody Compares to You

The scarlet of the rose Jinhyuk holds between his fingers seems to almost glow beneath the warm white light of the small flower shop, the petals feathery and soft. The air around him is filled with the delicate aroma of the fresh blooms, reminding him far too much of the perfume that lingers still on the baby pink hoodie he keeps hidden in the back of his closet.

_Flowers and springtime, a brilliant smile, a thumb across the arch of his cheekbone._

A small part of his chest starts to twinge, a niggling ache he’s felt since that day a little over a year ago. Jinhyuk sets the rose back down on the wooden worktable, reaching instead for the bucket of delicately pink carnations he’d grabbed from the fridge earlier on. He lifts up the largest of the bunch and holds it against the sprigs of baby’s breath he’s already trimmed to size.

Yes, that’ll do it.

The bouquet comes together without much thought, his hands and fingers moving on pure muscle memory. By the time he has all of the display bouquets arranged and ready for the day, he can just barely begin to see the first rays of the honey-like sunrise breaking through the horizon. It’s going to be a beautiful day, much like every day has been since the last of the snow had fallen from the sky and the first of the daisies began to sprout from the reawakening earth.

Though why his heart still feels so heavy, Jinhyuk isn’t so sure.

“Good mornin’ mister, could you tell me what colour this is?” the young boy in front of him asks, holding up a single stalk of freesia with a determined glimmer in his eyes. The freesia’s petals are a bright, healthy yellow, the white ribbon Jinhyuk had tied around its stem slightly lopsided from the little boy’s less-than-gentle handling.

Jinhyuk smiles and kneels down, ruffling the boy’s hair affectionately. “It’s a yellow freesia, Jinwoo, which lucky lady in school is this for today?”

Jinwoo's gap-toothed grin warms him right up, the cherry red flush on his cheeks akin to the roses Jinhyuk has displayed around the counter. “It’s for Jiyeon, I think she’s the one, mister!” 

“That’s what you say for every girl you get flowers for, Jinwoo,” Jinhyuk teases, accepting the ten dollar note the boy hands him and ringing up the stalk of freesia for him. “And besides, you still can’t see colour yet, right?”

“Yeah but I think Jiyeon really is the one, she makes my heart go all funny when I see her playing the piano in music class,” Jinwoo says, clutching the freesia to his chest.

“But what if she isn’t your soulmate?”

“That don’t matter, Jiyeon is the one I love.”

There that twinge is again.

Jinhyuk hands Jinwoo back his change and musses his hair once more. He tucks a small cutting of leftover baby’s breath into the ribbon and wishes the boy luck, thinking back on the days where love was as simple as the butterflies you feel in the pit of your belly at the sight of fingers flying across ivory keys.

But perhaps love still is that simple, it’s just the people that change.

Just like he had: far, far too much.

He inhales deeply, wondering whether or not that pain in his heart is from missing what he once had or just what he could’ve.

* * *

“You’re back late again,” Minkyu mutters as he crawls into bed behind him, his brown hair tousled and mussed. His body is curled in on himself, the bones of his hips prominent beneath his fingers. He smells like vanilla beans, like those cupcakes he’d eaten once at that bakery down on 6th street.

He hates how the memory of bright pink icing clinging to those long, thin fingers drifts to the forefront of his mind.

(He hates how it brings a smile to his lips even more)

Jinhyuk pulls back from his soulmate, rolling over so his back is to him. He breathes in the cottony scent of their sheets instead, not wanting to fall asleep with the images of times long passed in his head, not wanting that smile to appear in his dreams for yet another night.

“I know,” he whispers, grateful that Minkyu doesn’t attempt to move closer.

All he does is sigh, a heavy sound that weighs down on his ribs as he lies awake staring at the lines of their ceiling. Anything to keep from dreaming, anything to keep from remembering—

* * *

_“Boo!” his body is soft against his as he pounces on him, pinning him to his mattress with a wicked grin. His hair is wild around his face, the black waves framing his round cheeks and sparkling eyes (he says they’re golden brown, he thinks they’re beautiful even in shades of grey). “I gotcha this time, huh!”_

_He only nods, the honey-like feeling of affection surging through his very veins at the sight of him. Satisfied, he makes to get off of him, the hem of the shirt (one of his) he currently has on rising on his thighs as he moves. Jinhyuk pulls him back down, his head spinning as it always does whenever he kisses him._

_Three years and counting and he still makes his heart flip._

_“You’re the one,” he wants to say, but somehow the words just won’t leave his lips._

* * *

_“I think he’s the one,”_ he’d told his mother the night before he’d confessed, prepared to see colours once he had. The disappointment that had filled him when the world remained in black and white despite his hand in his had been immeasurable, though thinking back on it now, he wonders if that’d been because he wasn’t his soulmate or because his soulmate wasn’t _him_.

The red carnations look especially beautiful today, Jinhyuk thinks he might very well just take some home himself.

The coffee he sips is strong and bitter, the cup warming his bare hands against the residual chill lingering in the air from the final whispers of winter. He’d finished up with the display bouquets a little earlier today, deciding to round up the morning watching the sun rise from the small bench outside his shop for a change instead.

Jinhyuk squints as the light begins to streak through the foggy grey-blue of the morning sky, wondering just when the rich honey butter of the sunlight had turned so dull. Perhaps it’s time to make a trip to the optometrist again, get his eyes checked out.

He takes a glance to his right and frowns; the rouge pink of the camellias strong and bright.

* * *

Minkyu isn’t home when he kicks off his shoes in the entryway that nigh. The living room is filled with the smell of his cologne, his collection of shoes are strewn haphazardly across the floor. The apartment has never felt so empty, the half empty bottle of vodka sitting on the kitchen counter cutting into him more deeply than any knife could.

He’d done this. He’d hurt them both.

His footsteps are quick as he crosses the room to pick up the bottle, the spirit burning his throat as he takes a long gulp. It burns so much he doesn’t even notice how the red of the camellias he has placed in the vase on the coffee table fades from scarlet to blush, or maybe he does.

Maybe he just can’t bring himself to care.

* * *

There’s a puddle of water on the pavement across from his shop that he slips on on his way to work, the wetness seeping into the back of his jeans as his legs slide right out from under him. Jinhyuk’s almost tempted to lie back down and wish for the ground to swallow him up, though the thought of the brand new shirt he has one keeps him from doing so. His palms are skinned, tiny beads of dull red forming on the scrapes across them.

He winces as he pushes himself up to his knees, the strands of hair falling in his eyes looking more white than blond. The patch of cyclamens growing beside where he’d fallen are freshly bloomed, crumbs of brown earth clinging to damp leaves. The white of the petals is almost radiant, the dew drops balancing on them casting refracted beams of early morning light and twinkling like diamonds.

Jinhyuk contemplates for a moment about plucking one from the ground to bring back to the shop, though the sight of the small, delicate buds hidden between the flowers halts his hand. Pulling them up would mean that they’d die, that he’d be the one killing them.

Goodness knows he’s killed far too many blossoms already; he should let at least one beautiful thing in his life grow.

* * *

He thinks he sees him in the crowd one day, a flash of those golden brown eyes so bright against the dull hues of the world he can feel his head spin. But then within a second they’re gone, the hopelessness he feels as strong as the day he’d watched his plane lift off from the runway.

_“Did you know that yarrow means undying love, Jinhyuk?” Wooseok whispers to him one night from under the crook of his arm, his temple pressed against the soft curve of his shoulder. His voice is slurred and sleepy, a yawn bubbling up mid sentence in a way that makes his heart skip a beat._

_He shakes his head, gently as to not shift him too much. “I didn’t, that’s pretty cool though.”_

_“Wicked cool,” he agrees, his eyes sliding close. Jinhyuk is entranced by the way his lashes cast shadows over the arch of his cheekbones, by the way his breath fogs in the chilly winter night. He loves him, he loves him more than he longs for any of the colours of the rainbows he sees in the horizon. “It’d be fun to run a flower shop, don’tcha think, Jinhyuk?”_

“Did you know that yarrow means undying love, Minkyu?” he asks him, fingering the paper-soft purple petals of the hyacinths he’s brought home for their living room. Minkyu’s fingers halt in their combing of his hair, his gaze flicking towards his reflection in the hallway mirror. His eyes are painted in the crimson he’d bought for him last Christmas, the colour vibrant against the gradually dulling colours of their home almost as if it were mocking him.

Minkyu’s brows knit together, marring the perfect face he’d forced himself to love. “What are you talking about now?” he sounds annoyed, he figures he’d be too if he were in his position. They’d never clicked together the way they should have, their edges just didn’t line up like the adjacent pieces of a puzzle they should be. “I’ll be out late tonight, don’t bother waiting up.”

And then he’s gone, the last of the colours walking out the door right along with him.

* * *

They break up two days later. The world goes back to the grey tones Jinhyuk had never thought would comfort him the way they do. Working in the flower shop becomes a little more difficult than it was before but he manages just fine, never feeling more grateful for his supplier taking the time to label each bucket of flowers with their colours than now.

His bouquets are still beautiful, the blooms still crisp and elegant in their soft paper wrappings. Jinwoo ends up seeing colour with Jiyeon after all, demanding for one of the red roses he has displayed at the front of the store with such a dramatic flourish one morning that Jinhyuk can’t help but smile despite the heaviness in his chest.

Life goes on—or perhaps it has only just restarted after that day a year and a half ago when he’d left. Time had paused for him that day, his world had stopped spinning. For three years Wooseok had been his universe, he’d placed all of his hopes and expectations on him, just waiting for the day he’d bring colour to his skies the way he’d done to his heart.

But he’d been wrong then, he knows now. It’d been unfair to resent the greyness of his world when he was blind to the vibrance his very being had sparked in his life, when he’d abandoned him for the first person to bring those colours he’d almost convinced himself he desired less than him without half a thought.

The bells above the door to the store ring as someone steps inside, and Jinhyuk puts down the trimming scissors in his hands to greet them. He turns on his heels with the largest smile he can muster, though the greeting his lips are forming is silenced at the sight of the golden brown eyes he swore he had all those years ago, at the smell of the flowery perfume he still wears even after all this time.

The world doesn’t explode into colour.

No, the only colour that exists is him.

Because Wooseok had never needed to bring the colours, not when he’d been them all along.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been gone for forever I'm so sorry T_T 
> 
> I've just been major depresso about what's been happening with our babies that I couldn't bring myself to write anything for them, then the trailer for PS. I Still Love You came out and all I could think of was Weishin and I just had to write something, anything. So here we are!! A very haphazard, very rusty, metaphorical-ish piece of supposed-to-be-fluff-but-has-somehow-turned-angsty work that I hope you all enjoy!!!
> 
> If anyone has enough free time to go through the story and check each flower mentioned in the order they appear, they sort of tell a story in themselves :>>>
> 
> Leave some kudos and reviews if you all are kind T_T I desperately need the feedback on my terribly rusty writing. 
> 
> Love you all!!!
> 
> Follow me @chocochimkook on twt and curiouscat :>


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